Abdul R. JanMohamed

Born and raised in Kenya and educated in the US (Univ. of Hawaii, BA; Brandeis Univ., PhD), Abdul JanMohamed has taught in the English Department at UC, Berkeley since 1983. His publications include Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa; The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (co-edited with David Lloyd); The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright's Archaeology Of Death; (ed.) Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class, and Caste. He was the founding editor (along with Donna Przybylowicz) of Cultural Critique, a journal initially designed to provide a venue for the theorization of postcolonial and American minority literary and cultural discourses and for contemporary cultural theory.

The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death
JanMohamed's book explains the ideological and political functions of the threat of lynching in the works of Richard Wright. Arguing that Wright's oeuvre is a systematic exploration of "the death-bound-subject," JanMohamed draws on psychoanalytic, Marxist, and phenomenological analyses to show that with each successive work Wright delved deeper into the questions of how living....

Reconsidering Social Identification: Race, Gender, Class, and Caste.
This volume is an argument for further cross-national, interdisciplinary dialogue on the political economy of social identification and division. It investigates how four socially constructed identities – race, gender, class, and caste – may be rethought as matrices that facilitate the accumulation of values and translate and transfer them from one category to anoth....

The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed., with David Lloyd, Oxford University Press, Fall 1990.

Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1983; 2nd edition, 1988.

“Literary Criticism as Archaeology of Identity Politics: A Critique of Poststructuralist Heterophelia and a Reading of Beloved,” published by the International Comparative Literature Association, Expanding the Frontiers of Comparative Literature: Toward an Age of Tolerance, vol 2, ed. Sung-won Cho, Chuang-Ang University Press, 2013

“Specularity as a Mode of Knowledge and Agency in Richard Wright’s Work,” in Philosophical Meditations on Richard Wright and His Work, ed. James Haile, Lexington Books, January 2012, pp 143-63.

“Renegotiating the Death Contract,” in Translation Series of 21st Century Western Critical Theories, Henan University Press, June 2011 (Chinese translation of chapter 8 of The Death-Bound-Subject)

“Between Speaking and Dying: Some Imperatives in the Emergence of the Subaltern in the Context of U.S. Slavery,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed Rosalind Morris, Columbia University Press, 2010, pp. 139-55.

Whereas The Death-Bound-Subject explored the central role of the threat of death (aka, lynching) on the formation of individual and collective subjects in slave and Jim Crow societies, his current research, provisionally entitled Thick Love: Birthing the Death-Bound-Subject, focuses on black feminist neo-slave narratives that depict the vicissitudes of giving birth to and nurturing life in a culture organized around the production of death-bound-subjectivity. More generally, his current research is animated by an attempt to theorize why and how people “allow” themselves to be coerced and exploited so thoroughly and relentlessly.